Mess Me Up (Bear Bottom Guardians MC #1)Author: Lani Lynn Vale

Sometimes life just kicks you in the balls and you have to deal with it.

-Rome’s secret thoughts

Rome

RP’s Biggest Fan,

I’m not sure how you became my therapist, or how we even got to the point of being pen pals, but I’ll take what I can get.

I could use a friend.

So, you want to hear about my life? How it’s nowhere near as glamorous as everyone makes it out to be?

Where should I start?

How about the paparazzi. They’re awful. They follow me home. They follow me to work. They follow me to my son’s appointments—though technically, they don’t know he’s my son. Luckily. That was one thing I did manage to do right—keeping him out of the limelight.

Lucky for me, too. Or, at least for him.

And if the paparazzi wasn’t bad enough, my ex was only with me for my money—because she knew that I had it.

If there was one thing I could erase from my life, it would be her.

But, if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have my son…and at this point, he’s the single bright light in the sea of darkness that is my life.

Last week she threatened to sue me because I broke the custody agreement we have for our son. Do you want to know what I did? Nothing. Not one damn thing. I stayed at her house while she went away for the day, and I put a drink on her coffee table.

Let me repeat that…I put a drink on her coffee table.

Ok, so it was a Coke can, and I didn’t use a coaster… but I’d finished the damn thing. It was completely empty, it wasn’t sweating, and it didn’t leave any sort of mark.

But, with the way she reacted, you would’ve thought that I’d carved my initials in the table using a screwdriver or something.

Oh, and let’s not forget what my team manager wants me to do.

He wants me to pose naked except for a strategically positioned football for Sports Illustrated. When did Sports Illustrated stop focusing on sports in favor of selling what’s sexy?

You told me last week that you weren’t sure that you were going to write anymore. I realize that this back and forth we have going on isn’t normal, but if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.

I hope you write to me soon, RP’s Biggest Fan.

Rome.

Part 1

Chapter 1

I do all my ironing in the dryer.

-Rome’s secret thoughts

Rome

“I can’t do this anymore, Rome.” Tara’s sad eyes met mine. “It hurts too much to watch him suffer. I…I have to go.” She transferred my sleeping son into my arms as she spoke.

I looked at my baby mama, the woman that I was never really in love with but had given me my son. The same woman who had literally taken everything I’d ever loved away from me.

First and foremost, she had been the reason I lost my best friend, Tyler.

“What about Matias?” I asked, trying to think of something, anything, else but Tyler. “What am I going to tell him when he wakes up?”

She squared her shoulders and then shot me what was her best attempt at a pain-filled expression.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But what I do know is that I can’t watch my baby die. I just can’t.”

Then she pulled her suitcase into the entry and turned around, going through the door, never once looking back.

I knew what she was saying was a lie. That whole scene was nothing but a big, fat lie.

The only reason she stayed with Matias as long as she had was because doing so gave her access to me—and my wallet. I’d been a professional football player when we met, but after I announced my retirement at the end of last season, Tara changed.

Then I went and joined a motorcycle club, and well…that, as one would say, was all she wrote.

She thought she’d signed up for a life of fat paychecks, the notoriety of being a professional football player’s wife, and everything else that came with that life. What she did not sign up for was a sick kid, a washed-up football player, and a man who was slowly losing everything he’d been given.

The one thing that had saved me was my motorcycle club—the Bear Bottom Guardians.

Bear Bottom, Texas was a small town between Longview and Kilgore, right in the middle of nowhere—at least at first. The town was founded by the MC and growing a hell of a lot faster than anyone ever imagined it would.

The population had started small—a mere few hundred souls—and had grown to almost twenty times that—and almost all of them had been bikers, their old ladies, and their families.

Bear Bottom Guardians had been just an idea at first, but slowly over the course of the years since the club had been formed, it’d turned into something much more. A place to be without having to worry about who you were.

We had a police station. We had a firehouse. We had an excellent school system and several bars. Hell, we even had our own transit system, even if it was just vans instead of real buses.

And the club was responsible for making this town what it was today.

Though technically, we were affiliated with the Dixie Wardens, we had broken off from the main club to become more independent—or at least a few of the original founding members had. I’d come later, once all the fun stuff had happened—like telling the Dixie Wardens that we didn’t actually want to be Dixie Wardens. We were the Bear Bottom Guardians MC through and through, now.

And I wouldn’t even have the Bear Bottom Guardians MC if it wasn’t for my ex-teammate, Linc James. Linc had given me a gift, and he didn’t even know it.

I’d been struggling with life eight months ago.

I’d lost nearly everything. My child, my reason for living, had been diagnosed with leukemia. My best friend, the man who had been a constant in my life for the majority of it, hadn’t spoken to me in over four years because of Tara.

Tara was a lying, deceitful bitch, and the catalyst that caused my life to go down the shitter.

Then Linc had taken me to a party while we were home that just so happened to be at the Bear Bottom clubhouse.

That night, I’d made some friends. The little idea of becoming a member of a motorcycle club—a part of a club like Tyler and I had promised each other we’d do one day—had taken root.

When I’d gotten out of the NFL, retired early due to an injury that just wouldn’t go away—at least that was what the media thought, anyway. The real reason was due to my son being extremely sick, and me not wanting to chance not being able to see or spend time with him while I was working and gone for days and weeks on end.

I’d been floundering.

Then one morning, I ran into Liner while I was having breakfast at a diner, and he’d fanned that ember, reminding me that I didn’t have to be alone.

That was when I started to prospect.

Six months later, I was a full-blown member of the Bear Bottom Guardians MC, and that was all she wrote.

My phone pinged, and I looked down at the screen to see a message from Tyler.

Grinning at the meme he’d sent me, I replied, then dropped my phone onto the coffee table.

The coffee table that I had to leave clean every time Tara left me with Matias, or else I’d face her wrath.

Tara hated me—even more so lately—and that was because of one man, Tyler.

Tyler, my best friend since before I could walk, had been stolen from me. How had he been stolen from me? Because of Tara.

Tara was a greedy, devious, and cunning woman who didn’t care who or what she had to trample over in her rush to get what she wanted.

Sure, I wasn’t completely innocent in what happened, but I was only guilty of being stupid, careless and reckless. Stupid for thinking only with my dick that night and careless about who I took to bed. I hadn’t cared who she belonged with, just as long as I was taking someone there. It was ultimately my recklessness, though, for letting a woman that I knew nothing about lead me by my dick to my bed that was my demise.

I’d been celebrating at my home with a couple of the boys from my team when she walked in. After a few drinks, I’d been drunk and happy, and Tara came on to me.

Not one to turn a pretty lady down, I took advantage of the easy pickings.

As it turned out, those easy pickings also happened to be dating Tyler—although I hadn’t known that at the time seeing as we hadn’t exchanged a single detail about each other before we’d hopped into bed.